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Personal BS >  Dodge Magnum >  Dirty Butts & Ray Guns

 

  
Dirty Butts & Ray Guns

Well, its not a ray gun unless you squint a little...

Anyone who owns a Magnum finds out real fast that their hind ends get dirty very, very quickly.  This isn't a design flaw in the car so much as it is the inescapable result of simple physics.  The problem is this:  As the Magnum bulls its way through the atmosphere, it pushes aside the air it moves through, replacing that air with its own mass.  Air is thus flowing around it on all sides.  The air passing over the top essentially travels over and shoots off the back in a straight line.  The same goes for the air whooshing by on the sides.  This air doesn't come back in behind the Magnum for several feet behind it after it passes.  This in turn causes a low pressure area behind the car, where once there was a Magnum taking up that space, now there's nothing as the air that could have filled up the space behind it hasn't quite filled in that gap yet.

Or, unfortunately, there's not quite nothing... Air from the top and sides doesn't fill in the gap as I mentioned, but the stuff coming out from the bottom side sure does.  In fact its sucked up into that aforementioned low pressure area quite handily.  And since its coming from the bottom of the car, its coming from the same place where you can expect the maximum amount of crud to be located.  How much of that crud gets deposited on your Magnum's duff depends on what sort of weather you are having.  It can be a feather-dusting of dirt on a dry day or what seems to be a bucketful of grit during rain or a wet snow.

So how do you clean off the Magnum's ass-end?  This thread is a link to the mother of all discussions on this subject.  It covers a wide variety of possible solutions, including most notably the use of vortex generators.  Read this thread and you'll learn a lot in a short time.  I personally tried one experiment with the VG's and didn't find them to be particularly appealing to the eye, or particularly functional.  There are professionally designed vortex generators that may yield better results but I wasn't inclined to slap 'em on after I found what felt was a better, multipurpose solution.

Remember how I mentioned that on dry days all you get is a light dusting?  I bought a Makita UB141 blower/vacuum from mistermakita on EBay for about US$40.  It pumps out air at 78 cfm and 178 mph.  I'll give you three guesses what I had in mind when I bought it.  And it works fantastically.  Two seconds of air in the morning while still in the garage and I'm done.  Plus, when I wash the Magnum its perfect for blasting water out of crevices that otherwise will leak it out all over the finish when the car hits the road.  I hate that.

Plus you can use it for blasting the rest of the car.  I like to get the back side, then walk it forward over the car, getting the roof and the hood as I walk the blower back to its home spot in the back of the garage.  Its cut down my need to wash the forever dirty Brilliant Black Magnum by maybe 1/3 to 1/2 in dry weather.

Its a lightweight little bugger, easy to swing around and easy to hold onto without tiring, and point at specific spots when you are using it as a water-blower. Not that much bigger than a drill when you take the nozzle off. And that black nozzle is made out of relatively soft rubber so if you swing it around and bump your Magnum (you will) its no-harm, no-foul.

*Note that the blower price above is for the blower ONLY.  You can use the 14.4v battery and charger rom your other Makita tools, or buy those as well.  If you need to do so I strongly recommend you contact the seller directly, as almost everyone on EBay will make you a killer deal on combined shipping and multiple item purchases.

 



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